


Have a Little Faith In Me

by ChancellorGriffin



Series: The Doctor Mechanic Chronicles [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Mount Weather, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-20 05:21:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4775213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven and Abby's physical therapy after returning home from Mount Weather brings up emotional complications, and painful memories of the first time they met - a year ago, on the Ark, on a night when moonshine, a deck of cards, attraction and shared grief began to turn into something more, but their losses were too raw and recent.  Their past is tangled and complicated - their future is uncertain - and for the present, they're both just trying to put one foot in front of the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "When the Road Gets Dark"

**Author's Note:**

> When the road gets dark  
> And you can no longer see  
> Just let my love throw a spark  
> And have a little faith in me
> 
> And when the tears you cry  
> Are all you can believe  
> Just give these loving arms a try  
> And have a little faith in me
> 
> When your secret heart  
> Cannot speak so easily  
> Come here, darlin'  
> From a whisper start  
> To have a little faith in me
> 
> And when your back's against the wall  
> Just turn around and you will see  
> I will catch you, I will catch your fall  
> Just have a little faith in me
> 
> I will hold you up  
> I will hold you up  
> Your love gives me strength enough  
> So have a little faith in me
> 
> \--John Hiatt, “Have a Little Faith In Me”

 

Jackson was worried.

He was doing the best he could not to show it – Abby had to give him credit for how carefully he was struggling to keep his face neutral – but every time her step faltered and she had to reach out towards the wall for support she could feel him behind her, could feel his entire body tensing up. She could feel how badly he wanted to reach out his arms to catch her if she fell.

But he didn’t.

She was never going to learn to walk properly again if Jackson didn’t let her do this on her own.

Which meant, occasionally, letting her come very close to falling.

In Jackson’s defense, for the past ten days he had been doing an impossible job as well as he could. No one had returned from Mount Weather unscathed, and everyone with a bare minimum of field medic experience – or, lacking that, common sense and the ability to follow shouted directions – was conscripted to dress wounds all over the camp. And Abby was among the most severely hurt, so Jackson was running Medical all by himself. Lincoln, Octavia and Kane had made themselves invaluable almost immediately, helping to treat all but the most serious injuries, and even Bellamy had picked up a thing or two from –

Well –

He couldn't say her name in front of Abby.

He tried very hard not to _think_ her name in front of Abby.

It was still too soon. 

No, Jackson was doing his best. But ten days after the return from the mountain, with the camp’s broken bones set, its minor cuts and sprains and bruises largely treated, he had thrown himself headfirst into what he deemed to be his most important job – physical therapy.

And his two patients were not making life easy on him.

Neither Raven nor Abby had taken kindly to forced bed rest, but even they – two of the most stubborn people in Camp Jaha – had been forced to concede that they were beaten. No amount of grit or determination could make a near-crippling wound to the femoral shaft heal overnight. Their legs just plain didn’t work. They were both furious – at Cage Wallace, at themselves, at their injured legs, at anyone who tried to come near them, and - after Jackson forced them both to sleep in the brig because Abby’s quarters were up a ladder and Raven’s cot couldn’t be rigged to elevate her leg – occasionally even at each other.

Whatever tentative intimacy might have been blossoming between Raven and Kyle Wick died a hard, brutal death after the first 48 hours back from the mountain, when the full extent of her injury finally became clear to Raven. After all the exhausting hard work of attempting to reclaim some degree of mobility following her spinal injury, here she was again, trapped in a body that couldn’t do what she needed it to do. After the sixth broken machinery part hurled at Wick’s head in response to an offer to carry her somewhere, he finally just stopped trying.

But yelling, at least, is better than nothing, so Raven’s short fuse was at least a degree less terrifying than Abby’s frozen silence. She had retreated entirely into herself, into some dark inner room where nothing and no one could reach her - not even Kane, try as he might.  He came by every few hours, bringing meals and news and visitors, but despite his best efforts, his attempts at conversation rarely went anywhere.  Raven would take pity on him sometimes and engage in half-hearted small talk for a few minutes at least; but Abby had almost nothing to say.

Jackson privately suspected that she could have borne one loss if she had not been faced with the other at the same time; her injury and agonizingly slow recovery would have been nothing if her daughter had been home, had survived, had been standing there at her side to hold her hand.  And Clarke’s disappearance would not have caused so much pain if Abby was whole and strong enough to have run out the gate after her. Both at the same time was too much, and something inside of her had simply . . . broken. Something Jackson could not repair.

This was why Abby was the doctor, and he was her assistant. He could deal with a femoral artery, but he couldn’t make Abby whole again.

Except that he had to.

_He had to._

Abby was the camp’s only doctor. And Raven was their best mechanic.  They were invaluable. Camp Jaha would never survive without them.

Which meant that it was on Jackson, somehow, to make it right.

And so he clenched his jaw and he kept his hands at his sides and he watched Abby take three limping, wobbly steps from her bed in the old brig towards the chair he had placed in the middle of the room.

After a week and a half of forced confinement and as aggressive a physical therapy regime as Jackson would allow, both women were exhausted, short-tempered, sore all over, bored and anxious.  It was a highly stressful combination for the also-exhausted Jackson, and the tension in the brig had reached an all-time high today.  As Abby hobbled back and forth between her bed and the chair, face contracted in pain at every move of the muscles in her bad leg, sweat beaded on her forehead and her breath came harsh and sharp.  Raven, who had had her turn already and was recovering, lay sprawled out on her bunk across the brig from Abby's, tinkering with a salvaged Mount Weather radio – one of the few tasks Sinclair and Kane would allow her to tackle, since it required no large tools and she could do it sitting down with her leg elevated.  She appeared totally occupied in the task, but every time Abby stumbled, Raven's hands paused mid-motion, and Jackson knew she was paying closer attention than it looked.

"Can we have class outside tomorrow?" Raven asked.  "It sucks in here.  I feel like I'm in prison."

“We _are_ in prison,” muttered Abby, panting a little with exertion as she finally completed her tenth set of steps and lowered herself down to the floor beside her bed, wincing a little, to do her stretches.

"You know what I meant."

"Yeah, I know.  You meant to complain that our accommodations aren't to your liking."

"Hey.  Knock it off.  It's not like you enjoy this any more than I do."

"No, I don't.  But at least I have the good manners not to bitch about it to Jackson."

"I wasn't bitching."

“I don’t like it either, Raven, but we’re stuck in here until we’re both steady enough to handle uneven ground. And ladders. And stairs. And that piece-of-crap web of old seatbelts and scraps of tarp you call your bed.”

“Hey now –“

“We need a flat, even floor with low beds, access to a bathroom and room to hobble around like old ladies with Jackson three times a day,” said Abby. “It was the brig or nothing. Deal with it."

“It’s gonna get pretty damn crowded over here in Cripple Quarters once Kane goes back to arresting people,” Raven muttered, in a deliberately provoking tone.  "You know that’s like his favorite thing.”

“Don’t call it Cripple Quarters, and lay off Kane. He’s basically running this whole camp until I’m back up on my feet, we all owe him one.  Everyone's doing the best they can, and you've done nothing but bitch since we got in here."

"And _you've_ done nothing but sulk," Raven fired back.  "This is the most you've said to either of us in ten days and it's just to lecture me about my attitude.  Thanks a lot."

"Maybe if you tried a little harder to -"

"Don't snap at me when it's Clarke you're pissed at," snapped Raven irritably, and the whole room stopped moving as they all realized at the same time what she had said.  Jackson looked stricken, like Raven had slapped him across the face.  Abby's face was blank.  "Abby," said Raven a little uncertainly, but Abby didn't even look at her.  She sat with her back against her bunk, staring into the center of the room, in Raven's general direction but without really seeing her.  "Abby."

Abby ignored Raven, retreating back into a frosty silence.  Jackson shot Raven a gently reproving glance that made Raven's cheeks flush hot with mortification, and she busied herself with the radio in her lap to distract herself.  After a long, still, silent moment, Abby went back to her stretches, leaning forward at the waist to grasp her ankle and lift the leg a few inches off the floor, then lowering it again.  But she only made it through two or three lifts before she cried out in pain, causing Raven to drop the radio and Jackson to rush to Abby's side. 

The muscle cramps were awful - sharp, shooting pain through the thigh that struck both women at the most inopportune moments.  Raven had taken three bad falls from a leg cramp seizing her while she was trying to walk unassisted, and Abby two.  Abby desperately tried to massage the pain out of her cramped upper thigh muscles, tears stinging her eyes.  Jackson took over, his strong expert hands anchoring her through the pain and slowly bringing her back down to earth.  It took a long time for the pain to subside, and the relief of it caused Abby to sink back gratefully against the wall behind her, limp and exhausted.

"I'm sorry," she said wearily, and neither of them quite knew which of them she was talking to.  "It's miserable in here.  We’re miserable. It’s turned us both into total monsters.”

"Hey, don't apologize for me," Raven protested, but with half a smile, which got half a smile back from Abby in return.

"Then you apologize yourself," Abby retorted.  "Lord knows he's earned it."

“Are you two done snapping at each other?” came Sinclair’s voice as he stepped in through the door. “Because one of the kids on firewood detail just came back with a sprained ankle and I need Jackson in Medical.”

“Go,” said Abby, before Jackson could respond. “We’re fine.”

She could tell he wanted to say more, but he didn’t. He just shot her one more worried look and then followed Sinclair out the door.

Abby stole a glance over at Raven, who was once again absorbed in her radio.  She sighed, heaving her body awkwardly into a kneeling position to climb into her bunk, then used both hands to haul her injured leg up after her and stretched out flat on her back, breathing hard from exertion.  She had more stretches to do, a series of gentle leg-lifts to improve her circulation and strengthen her upper thigh muscles, but today every movement caused the still-unhealed drill wound through her bone and muscle to cry out with pain. After the fifth attempt, without even managing to raise her leg off the bed by an inch, she gave up, eyes stinging with tears of pain and frustration. But she did not want to cry in front of Raven – for a whole host of complicated reasons – so she gritted her teeth and swallowed them back down, breathing hard to suppress the shooting pain.

“Why is he the only one you’re nice to?” asked Raven out of nowhere, and Abby turned suddenly to look at her across the room. She was still tinkering with the radio, the picture of idle nonchalance, but there was something studied about it. She was trying very hard to look casual. She was trying very hard to look like she didn’t care.

“What do you mean?”

"You're all creepy and quiet with Kane," Raven pointed out, "and with pretty much everyone else.  And you just snap at me.  But you’re always nice to Jackson.”

"Because I'm the hardest on him," Abby said after a long moment, surprising them both with the unvarnished truth.  “He’d walk into fire if I told him to. He’d step in front of a bullet. And sometimes I forget that, and take him for granted, and I yell at him because there’s no one else around to yell at. During all the worst periods of my life, Jackson’s been there and borne the brunt of it. I’d be nowhere without him. But that doesn’t always stop me from throwing a pen across the room and accidentally hitting him in the head with it when I lose my temper.”

This made Raven laugh. She set down the radio she was only pretending to fix and risked a direct look at Abby for the first time.

“This really sucks, huh?” she said, forcing a half-smile that did nothing to cover the shimmer of frustrated tears in the corner of her eyes. Abby nodded back.

“Yeah,” she agreed, eyes shining with unshed tears of her own. “It really sucks.”

 

_Jackson is worried._

_She catches him watching her when he thinks she isn’t looking, catches him averting his eyes or turning quickly away. His brow is furrowed and his warm dark eyes are heavy with concern._

_She doesn’t know how to say to him – to the kindest, most loyal person she knows – that his protectiveness is driving her crazy, even though she knows he isn’t wrong._

_Jackson is not wrong about Abby._

_Jackson has_ never _been wrong about Abby._

_Abby is not okay._

_Her husband is gone, his cold lifeless body floating somewhere in the vast darkness of space. There are times when she can almost find a bit of beauty in it, Jake flying and soaring among the stars – and then there are times when she remembers that opening the airlock is what the Ark does with criminals and trash, and the hopeless indignity and cruelty of it threatens to overtake her entirely._

_Jake is gone. Whether he is sailing through the dazzling colors of the Crab Nebula or clattering around a floating junkyard of broken machinery parts, he is never coming back to her._

_And Clarke -_

_Clarke, who did nothing wrong except love her father –_

_This is why Jackson is worried. The old Abby would have clung stubbornly to hope. The old Abby would have held her head high, knowing that her daughter was alive, that she could see her once a week, and that she had a whole year before Clarke turned eighteen, plenty of time to formulate a plan ensuring that the girl would be released instead of floated when her case came back up before the tribunal. The old Abby would have found a lawyer, would have lobbied the Council, would have set to work preparing to make sure that when the day came, she had a plan to save her daughter._

_Jackson is not sure what to do with this new Abby, this dead, blank-eyed shell. Her hands have lost none of their skill – she mechanically stitches up cuts and sets broken bones, even performs surgeries. She dresses the electrical burn of today's patient, a young zero-G mechanic, with crisp, robotic efficiency.  Her hands move automatically, her mouth says all the right things, and unless you had known her before – known that there used to be a warm, passionate,_ alive _woman inside those eyes – you’d think nothing of it. Doctors are sometime a little formal, after all. Cold. Clinical. It’s all right. It’s part of the job. You would have no idea you were talking to a ghost.  The mechanic could not possibly see it._

_But Jackson knows._

_And Abby knows that he knows._

_Which is why there are things one simply does not tell Jackson._

_Such as – for example – how a respected member of the Council finds herself spending evenings drinking illegal moonshine in the seedy back corner of an abandoned storeroom on Factory Station known simply as “The Tavern.”_

_The Tavern is where you go to place bets on underground fighting, or buy black-market morphine, or cheat on your wife. Officially, the Ark’s government and law enforcement feigns ignorance of its existence; unofficially, every time they tried to shut it down it would pop up again in another location.  Tired of chasing it from station to station and wasting manpower trying to find it again, eventually the Council simply gave up.  So here on Factory Station it remains._

_Still, the sight of a Council member sitting at the bar drinking is unusual enough that a wide berth opens up around Abby’s rickety corner table. Which, frankly, is perfectly fine. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. She just wants to get drunk in peace._

_“Easy, doc,” says a woman's voice from somewhere over her left shoulder, dry and teasing, and she wants to be irritated at the interruption but she_ knows _that voice, why does she know that voice? “They brew that shit triple-strength.”_

_“I know,” she says, without looking up. “That’s why I’m here.”_

_The voice becomes a moving shape and the moving shape steps out of the shadows into the unsteady greenish light and becomes a dark-haired girl that Abby recognizes. She stares at her for a long moment, trying to place her, before the penny drops and she realizes the girl has a bandage around her hand. Abby knows her own handiwork. Then it comes back to her._

_“You’re the mechanic,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily._

_“And you’re the doctor,” says the girl with a hint of a smile. “We’re good at this game.”_

_“Listen –“_

_“Raven.”_

_“Listen, Raven, I really just wanted to sit here and enjoy a quiet drink by myself. I didn’t come here to talk.”_

_“Who said anything about talking?” says Raven, and Abby is so startled at the easy familiarity of Raven’s come-on that she almost drops her drink.  Is that how it works, now?  Is it really just that easy?  Abby hasn't been picked up in a bar in a long time but she vaguely remembers having to work a little harder._

_Then she sees Raven pull out a deck of cards from her pocket, and realizes the girl has made a joke.  And also that she might be blushing._

_No.  She's too old to be flustered by a good-looking girl.  Too old to be hustled, too.  Abby's terrific at card games, at anything that has to do with probability and math, and suddenly the old Abby, the missing Abby, Jackson's Abby, stirs in her sleep as though waking back up again, roused by the idea of winning at something._

_“How good are you?” asks Abby as Raven takes a long drink from her own dented tin cup of moonshine and begins to shuffle the cards._

_“Oh, I’m good,” says the girl, shuffling with impressive dexterity. “Best you’ve ever seen.”_

_“You haven’t seen me yet.”_

_“Looking forward to it, doc.”_

Are we still talking about poker? _Abby can't tell anymore. There's a faint upwards curl at the side of Raven’s mouth, a little flicker of a teasing smile, that makes her wonder if the girl is flirting with her. She finds herself unexpectedly hoping that she is. She finds herself maybe flirting back._

_The darkness around Abby lifts – just a little – just for a moment – but it is enough._

_She has almost forgotten what it feels like to be looked at with something that isn't pity or concern.  If the mechanic knows Abby's sad dark past, she doesn't appear to care.  She asks nothing personal and volunteers nothing personal.  They're just two people with a deck of cards.  My God, how restful.  Abby has forgotten what it feels like just to be Abby.  Not the doctor or the Council member or the widow or the prisoner's mother.  Not a person defined in relationship to other people - to her patients, to Jake, to Clarke, to Jaha.  Just Abby.  Everywhere she goes on the Ark, she is recognized.  Everywhere she goes, people know exactly who she is and know everything terrible that has ever happened to her.  Sometimes they treat her gingerly, as though her grief has turned her to glass and they're afraid that if they speak too sharply she'll shatter.  Sometimes they pointedly talk around it, avoiding the topics of Clarke and Jake with such clumsy obviousness that their absence becomes a presence, as though they've lit up the vast dark pit of Abby's missing family with a glaring neon sign shouting "DON'T BRING UP THE DEAD HUSBAND!" in ten-foot letters.  Sometimes they ask her how she's doing, with their heads tilted sympathetically to the side, with an expression that declares how pleased they are with themselves for being considerate enough to inquire._

_All of it is unbearable.  And it happens every day._

_The thing that never happens is this - whatever_ this _is. Abby worked hard to build those walls; it's disconcerting to find that someone has simply pulled up a chair and smashed through them armed with nothing more than a glass of moonshine, a deck of cards, dark eyes and the inability to take no for an answer._

_Abby has come to the Tavern tonight to be alone and drunk and sad.  Nobody is more surprised than she is to find that by the end of the night she is actually only the second one of those things. They play for liquor rations, keeping the triple-strength moonshine flowing at their table. Abby does not know how old Raven is, but she is old enough to drink like a pro without ever missing a bet.   If the mechanic was a different kind of person, Abby might suspect cheating; but she recognizes a kindred spirit, she knows pride when she sees it, she knows this is a girl who would always rather do everything the hard way just to show you that she can.  Raven isn't counting cards, she's just that good.  Effortlessly._

_It's irresistible._

_Abby hasn't played cards at the full strength of her abilities in years.  When they were younger, they used to all play together - Jake and Thelonious and Abby and Callie and Kane - but she was so much better than everyone else that it stopped being fun for the others, and they switched to games that didn't cost them all so much money.  Basketball, sometimes, in one of the old Mecha Station storehouses that had been turned into a makeshift court.  Or chess - the guys liked chess - and Callie had taught her Mancala.  But nobody on the Ark with their wits about them would ever play poker with Abby Griffin._

_The dark-eyed mechanic, however, is too young to know any better, and wouldn't care if she did -_ kindred spirits, _thinks Abby again - so she's cocky at first, makes a few mistakes.  Abby takes the first three hands.  Raven is surprised, annoyed, and doesn't make the same mistakes again.  She's sharp as a tack and her instincts are flawless and it does something to Abby, it wakes some long-dormant part of her spirit up from a too-lengthy hibernation.  The fog begins to clear.  There is a pure, simple pleasure to be found in the swish and flip of the old, faded paper deck of cards with their beautifully ornate illustrations, in the furrow of Raven’s brow as she considers her next move, in her grin of unfeigned delight when she wins another hand. How restful not to think about Jake and Clarke, about Kane and Jaha, about the Council, about her Ark responsibilities, about her patients, about Jackson’s worried face as she withdraws further and further into herself. How pleasant, just for one night, to be someone else._

_Being someone else - being simply Abby again - is as intoxicating as the triple-strength moonshine.  And so, after Raven absolutely destroys her at Five-Card Draw, pockets every one of Abby’s remaining liquor allotment tokens, and then says the thing she unexpectedly says – “Wanna get out of here?” – Abby suddenly realizes, yes, she does, she does want to get out of there, she wants to step out of her own life and into Raven’s and spend the rest of this night being a completely different person. She would step out of her own skin if she could. She will do anything not to feel like Abby Griffin tonight._

_She says none of this to Raven. Instead, she knocks back the last of her drink, looks Raven in the eye, and says, “Let’s go.”_


	2. "Give These Loving Arms a Try"

Raven held out in the brig for two more weeks before she lost it.

It had started out as a pretty good day. Kane had brought over breakfast, with a bowl of glistening ruby-red strawberries as a contraband treat. The first of the supply caravans from Mount Weather had returned with a bounty of fresh produce and dry goods for the pantry stores, and a massive celebration was planned for that night, which Jackson had tentatively allowed Abby and Raven to attend on the condition that Kane and Bellamy not leave their sides. He didn’t trust crutches on the uneven, rocky ground full of hidden tree roots and soft mud patches, so the two tallest men in the camp had been conscripted as their babysitters. Kane and Bellamy were willing, Abby and Raven were indignant, and Jackson’s first physical therapy session was full of loud protestations that they were both perfectly well able to walk twenty feet from the brig to the central campfires without two full-time caregivers. But where Abby’s well-being was concerned, Jackson was perfectly capable of being even more stubborn than Abby, and could no more be budged than a cliff, so they were forced to either accept help or miss the party. And by this point they were so sick of the brig that they would have happily spent the night inside a Grounder prison cell for a change of pace, which Raven made a point of telling Jackson as he closed the door behind him.

Jackson had been pleased to see that, even with the inconvenience of what Raven described as "two dude babysitters", the prospect of getting out of the brig lifted both women's mood considerably.  Abby was almost talkative, and Raven thanked Kane for the strawberries as though they were almost friends.  It was huge progress, and Jackson was relieved to see it.  Kane stayed for nearly an hour, talking over New Council business with Abby and updating her on the progress of the supply caravans.  It all felt kind of . . . normal.  Almost pleasant. 

So of course it couldn't last.

"We should go," said Jackson to Kane.  "They get two hours of uninterrupted rest between ten and noon; morning P.T. is the hardest and they need to recover."

"Yes," agreed Abby, smiling, "you are interfering with naptime.  Shoo.  Both of you.  Get out."

"Yes, your majesty," Kane retorted, and they both laughed.  It was good to see Abby laugh, thought Jackson with a surge of emotion in his chest.  It was almost like having the old Abby back again. 

"By the way," Kane added as he stepped out the door, "I'm having a long-distance comm set up in here for the next few days.  Sinclair will come by before dinner to hook it all up."

"What for?" asked Raven, suddenly interested.

"For you," said Kane.  "I'm taking a crew up to the dam tomorrow to start putting a plan in place to reroute the Mount Weather electrical grid and the water mains.  We'll want you on comm to help talk us through it."

Raven stared at him, brow furrowed, eyes dark with barely suppressed fury.  Kane looked a little startled.  "I thought you'd want to help," he said uncertainly.

"Of course I want to help," she snapped.  "I should be on your crew."

"Raven, you can't -" 

She silenced Jackson with a wave of her hand.  "I know.  _I know._ I can't walk.  I can't make it up to Mount Weather.  I can't work with heavy machinery yet.  I _know,_ Jackson."

"We thought if we had a comm device set up for you -"

"It's Wick, isn't it?" she suddenly exclaimed.  "You're taking fucking _Wick_ instead of me."

"I'm taking several people," said Kane carefully.  "Wick, Monty, Sinclair and Bellamy are all coming along.  Obviously we wish we could take you -"

"No, this will be great," she retorted bitterly.  "This will be just as much fun.  I'll sit here in my goddamn prison cell doing leg exercises while you all get electrocuted because Wick wouldn't know a closed circuit from a punch in the face if it walked up and -"

"That's enough," said Abby repressively.  "I don't like it either, but if you put too much stress on the femoral shaft while it's healing -"

"I know, Abby, you've told me this a hundred fucking times before."

"Don't snap at Kane," she said calmly.  "He has a job he needs you to do.  It's not the one you wanted, but that isn't his fault."

"It's not like he's the one with a giant goddamn hole in his leg -"

"That's _enough_ ," Abby snapped at Raven so furiously that the girl took a step backward.  "Kane, Jackson, you can go," she said, her eyes not leaving Raven's.  They glared at each other across the room, arms folded, in stony silence, until the door closed behind both the men and they were alone again.

"He hates needles," said Abby, and the incongruousness of the remark took a little of the fight out of Raven.

"What are you talking about?"

"That's how I kept him off Sub-Level 3 while we were building the escape pod," she said.  "I told him there was a quarantine order and he'd need a vaccination.  But he's always been afraid of needles.  That's how I was able to hold him off for so long."

"What does that -"

"He offered to donate bone marrow to Mount Weather," said Abby flatly.  "He told Cage Wallace he would donate it, if only they would stop torturing the prisoners.  He meant his own.  He was willing to face his worst fear to keep them from hurting us."  Raven was silent.  "He would have traded places with either of us if he could," said Abby.  "He did everything.  _None_ of this is his fault."

"I'll tell you what's his fault," Raven muttered.  "It'll be his goddamn fault when the dam goes up in flames because Wick can't be trusted to -"

"You're exaggerating, Raven," sighed Abby, lowering herself back down onto her bunk.  "You're mad you can't go, so you're being all doomsday about this, but Kyle Wick is an excellent engineer and you know it.  He's not going to burn the dam down.  He's not even taking anything apart yet.  They're just going up there to look around." 

The clang of Raven's dented tin cup hitting the door of the brig startled Abby, and she turned to see Raven struggling to stand and move towards the door.

"Don't," said Abby warningly.  "Your leg -"

"Fuck my leg," snapped Raven.  "Fuck Wick, fuck Kane, fuck the electrical grid, fuck Cage Wallace and his _fucking_ drill, fuck Mount Weather -"

"Hey," said Abby gently, slowly trying to pull herself up from the bunk to stand and reach Raven.  "Hey.  Raven, it's okay."

"It's _not_ okay!" Raven whirled around to glare at Abby.  "It's not.  Why would you say that?  What part of this is _okay_ to you?  Is this how you wanted it?  You and me stuck in the fucking brig while Clarke's off God knows where and Kane takes fucking _Wick_ to fix the electrical grid because _I can't fucking walk_ -"

"Raven, you need to take a deep breath -"

"Don't talk to me like I'm a patient," Raven exploded, and slammed the palm of her hand as hard as she could against the metal bulkhead. 

"Raven, stop," said Abby gently, "you're going to make yourself crazy."  But Raven didn't hear her.  Instead, she went for the metal chair, lifting it above her head to throw it at the door Kane had just left through.

"Put it down, Raven," Abby cautioned her, and reached out a hand for Raven's arm.  But the chair crashed out of Raven's hand fruitlessly as a leg cramp seized the girl and she lost her balance.  She cried out, and Abby got there only just in time to catch her before she went down.  Awkwardly, minding her own damaged leg, she lowered them both to the ground, pressing and kneading against the flesh of Raven's thigh to soothe the furious pain of her cramped muscles.  It took two or three minutes before the gulping, gasping cries of pain died down and the coiled tension in Raven's body finally evaporated.  She collapsed against Abby, who cradled her in her arms, held close like a child, and stroked her hair soothingly as the girl’s back shook with furious sobs.

“I hate this,” Raven murmured brokenly, voice muffled by the fabric of Abby’s shirt. “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”

“I know.”

“I’m not me anymore.”

“Yes, you are,” said Abby firmly. “Your leg will heal, Raven.”

“You mean _this_ injury will heal,” corrected Raven. “There’s still nothing you can do for the old one.”

“Raven –“

“You said it yourself. You said I might never walk again.”

“Raven, don’t do this.”

“What’s the point,” Raven shot back at her in a choked voice, “what’s the point of _any_ of it, if I’m just going to be like this forever? In pain, _forever._ I’m useless, Abby. I can’t do anything. Everything hurts, I can’t focus – even that goddamn radio is taking too long – “

“Raven –“

“The electrical grid was supposed to be _mine_ ,” she exclaimed, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"I know," Abby murmured soothingly, "I know.  But Raven, Kane says he'll have you on comm the whole time, you can talk Wick and Monty through it -"

"It's not the same."

"I know.  But they couldn't wait until we're both on our feet again.  You know that.  They need to start laying cable down the mountain now, before the weather changes.  It doesn't mean you can't still be part of it, Raven, it just means you'll have to do it from here."

"I was going to fix it," said Raven in a small voice.  "I’m the one that's supposed to fix things. Me.  Not Wick, _me_. That’s what I do. That’s the only thing I’m good for. What am I without that?”

“You’re more than that, Raven,” Abby insisted gently. “You’re more than that to me.”  And then astonished them both by lifting Raven’s face towards hers and kissing her.

It had been so long, and so much had happened between them since the last time. Yet the moment Abby’s mouth brushed against Raven’s it was like no time had passed at all. Their bodies remembered. Even on the cold metal floor of the brig, even with two legs that still couldn’t move properly, their bodies remembered each other. They made love like the survivors of a shipwreck, clutching onto each other with fervent desperation as though afraid, once they had begun, of what would happen when they let go. There had been nobody, for Abby, since the last time with Raven, and she felt the small cold dark room she had retreated into after she came home from Mount Weather begin, just a little, to let in the light. She opened her mouth and her thighs and she let Raven inside her and she came over and over against Raven’s insistent fingers with the force of a tidal wave and she felt herself, just a little, begin to wake up.

Just like before.

_It's not that the sex isn't good._

_The sex is really good, actually.  Raven is young and limber and flexible, and she has moves Abby hasn't seen in years, not since a lifetime ago when she was young and limber and flexible too.  Raven is a terrific lover, and Abby comes hard, again and again, against Raven's hands and tongue and the friction of her thighs.  It's been a long time since Abby was with a woman, but it's all muscle memory, everything is right there the second she comes into contact with Raven's naked caramel skin.  She remembers how it all works.  Just like with Five-Card Draw, she finds herself rising to the challenge when faced with a partner at this level of skill.  Raven's amazing, and Abby becomes amazing just trying to keep up with her.  She dives into sex with Raven as hard and fast as she dived into playing cards with Raven, and the competitive edge between them that made the game fun makes the sex . . . well, kind of unbelievable.  They're not playing for liquor rations anymore, they're playing for that sound Raven makes when Abby's fingers slide into her up to the knuckle and then curl deep inside her, for the way Abby throws her head back and lifts her hips to meet Raven's mouth as she comes._

_So yeah.  The sex isn't the problem._

_The problem is that Abby is running so fast and far away from her own life that nobody who had ever met her before would recognize her tonight.  She has gone underground, she is fleeing the woman she is supposed to be right now - widow, mother, doctor, Councilor.  Every orgasm pushes that Abby further and further away.  It isn't until after Raven wins this game too and they finally collapse, spent and sweaty, on the rickety cot Raven calls a bed that Abby realizes the crashingly obvious thing she should have noticed before._

_Raven is running too._

_Something inside Raven's eyes is dark and desperate, like she can't quite decide whether she wants to hold Abby tight or push her away, and Abby suddenly finds herself wondering whether this was a terrible idea._

_Well.  No.  That's not true.   She already knows this is a terrible idea.  What she really means is that her conscience has begun, slowly, to come back to her, and it occurs to her that this might also have been a terrible idea for_ Raven.

_It occurs to her that she has only been thinking about herself._

_It occurs to her - dimly, distantly, like the thought is traveling to her from far away, like she is underwater and listening to someone call her name from the shore - that the old Abby did not used to behave this way.  The old Abby would never have gotten drunk in the Tavern and gone home with a girl young enough to be her daughter without ever once considering whether somebody might get hurt._

This isn't you, _calls the voice from the shore. She lays there in the cot, sticky with sweat and her own wetness, listening to the sound of her own breathing, and distantly wondering who the voice belongs to.  Jackson?  Jake?  Clarke?  Who is it, this person urgently calling out to her, trying to pull her back to herself?_

_"Abby," says the voice again, only it's not inside her mind, it's right there beside her, hoarse from moaning, panting a little bit, fluttering warm breath against Abby's shoulder, and she realizes that it's Raven._

_"Where'd you go?" says the girl, in a light voice that changes immediately when she speaks again to ask, "Are you okay?"_

_Abby does not realize she is not okay until Raven asks her.  She does not realize she is crying._

_She is naked, in the bed of a near-stranger twenty years younger than her, still coming down from a succession of dizzying orgasms, tangled in threadbare sheets that smell like sex and old machinery parts, and there are tears running down her face._

_"Abby," says Raven again, helplessly, and the look on her face is so heartbreaking -_ did I do this? _Abby can see the girl asking herself in silent panic._ Is this my fault? _\- that Abby does something that feels, somehow, a thousand times more intimate than all the very intimate things their naked bodies have already done._

_She puts her arms around Raven, buries her face in her hair, and lets herself cry._

_After a moment, Raven's arms slide around Abby's naked back, and she leans in to hold the older woman tight and close.  They sit like that together for a long time, Abby sobbing into Raven's dark, tangled hair like a lost child while Raven strokes her bare back with awkward but kind hands.  Finally Abby pulls away, all cried out and a little mortified, and wipes away the tears on her cheeks._

_"I'm sorry," she says rather awkwardly._

_"You don't have to apologize to me," says Raven, and there's warmth and concern in her voice, but it's not intrusive, it's not like Jackson, there's still just enough distance between them that Raven is more like a stranger than a friend, which makes her safer, in some way, Abby doesn't know why but it does.  And just for a moment, the door to the locked room inside Abby begins to creak open._

_Raven is safe._

_Raven is someone she can trust._

_"I don't have anyone else I can apologize to," Abby finally says, the words pressing onto her with a physical weight.  "For any of it.  For any of the things that happened.  There's no one left to apologize to."_

_She doesn't say anything in response to this, not at first.  She just looks at Abby, and finally, after a long moment, she nods._

_Raven understands.  In that moment, Raven sees everything._

_Oh no._

_Raven_ understands.

 _Somewhere, Raven has a Jake or a Clarke of her own.  Somewhere, Raven has these same scars.  That's what it means, that look in her eyes.  Abby is too intimately familiar with her own guilt-stricken grief not to know it the instant she sees it flash into someone else's eyes._ Who did _you_ betray, without meaning to? _Abby wonders._ Whose life did _you_ destroy?

 _Abby does not know yet who Finn Collins is.  She has no idea why he is locked up and Raven is free.  She has never even heard his name._   _But she does not have to know who he is to understand that he exists.  That Raven's heart is scarred too._

Oh, Abby.  What have you done?

_She was so blinded by her own grief that she ran as far and fast away from it as she could - and crashed headfirst into somebody else's._

_This was a bad idea._

_"I have to go," says Abby abruptly, vaulting from the bed as though Raven's touch is painful to her and hastily gathering up her clothes._

_"Abby -"_

_"This never happened," she snaps at Raven, harsher than she means to, furious at herself._

Who are you now, Abby Griffin?  What have you become?  All you do is hurt people. You destroy everything you touch.

_"Wait.  Abby, wait.  Where are you going?"_

_"I should never have - we should never -"_

_"Look, whatever it is," says Raven matter-of-factly, "you're going to have to talk about it eventually.  It might as well be now."_

_This stops Abby in her tracks.  She pauses in the act of pulling her clothes back on to turn back and look at Raven._

_"I can't," she says desperately.  "I can't talk about it."_

_"Why not?"_

_"Because I don't want you to look at me the way everyone else looks at me," she says, surprising herself by telling the truth.  "And if you knew -"_

_And then it clicks.  Abby recognized Raven's grief a moment ago; this is when Raven finally recognizes Abby's.  And so she doesn't press any further.  She knows what it's like to push down the dark thing you did so nobody else can see it, so nobody can hate you for it._   _The only reason Raven isn't dead right now is because she let Finn take the fall for her._ _Whatever happened to Abby, whatever Abby did, how could it be worse than that? she thinks.  Who is she to judge?_

_"Can I see you again?" Raven asks, hating herself a little for how needy it sounds, how plaintive.  But she wants to.  She really wants to.  This is the longest she's gone without having to think about Finn in months and she craves it, the blissful freedom of escape._

_"No," says Abby, pulling her shirt back on.  "This never happened."_

_"Abby -"_

_But it's too late.  Abby is already out the door._


	3. "When Your Back's Against the Wall"

They both slept in Raven’s bed that night, curled up tightly into the small cramped space. Raven wrapped her arms around Abby’s waist and held her tightly and breathed in the smell of her hair and tried very hard to quiet the hammering drums of _wanting_ that pounded inside her chest.

When she woke the next morning, Abby was already up. From her bunk, Raven watched through sleepy, half-opened eyes as Abby put her clothes back on. The scars on her back where Byrne had shock-lashed her hit just above the rise of her jeans, where her spine curved in. Raven hadn’t ever really looked at them before. Last night had happened too fast for either of them to remove more than the barest minimum of clothing, and she’d never had occasion to see Abby with her shirt off before then. Well, not down here on the ground, anyway. She watched as Abby hunted around on the floor for her missing shirt, and she looked at Abby’s back, and thought about the shock-lash scars.

She sat up in bed halfway, stretching a little and shaking the loose tangles of dark hair out of her face, and opened her mouth to start to say something – teasing her about how good she looked with no clothes on, maybe, or a hint about the whereabouts of the missing shirt, which Raven had just spotted on the floor – but stopped suddenly, frozen, as a pang so sharp she could physically feel it seeped inside her and squeezed at her heart.

Abby had unmade her own bed.

In the interval between Abby’s waking and Raven’s, she had gone back over to her own bunk – which had been neatly made up the night before; Abby made her bed every day, Raven never – and deliberately rumpled the blankets and sheets so it looked slept in.

Abby had not wanted anyone entering the brig to know that her bunk had been empty last night.

No, thought Raven, feeling all the air rush out of her lungs to be replaced by a hollow, cold emptiness. Not “anyone.”

There was only one person at Camp Jaha who would care in the least if he found out that Abby had spent the night in Raven’s bed.

Raven had never asked Abby what there was between her and Marcus Kane. She hadn’t felt, really, like she had any right. They had ended things on the Ark, after all; they had parted unsure if they’d ever see each other again. And hadn’t she come to Earth to find Finn? Hadn’t she been the unfaithful one? Hadn’t she run from her pain over Finn’s arrest straight to the Tavern and into bed with Abby? And hadn’t she done it again and again, down there on Sub-Level 3, taking breaks from repairing the escape pod to sneak up behind Abby and slide her arms around her waist and press her mouth against the back of her neck – even though everything she was down there on Sub-Level 3 to do was about finding Finn and making sure he was alive?

Wasn’t she, kind of, a terrible person?

She certainly felt like a terrible person.

She certainly felt like she had no right, after everything that had passed between them, to begrudge Abby the relationship the whole camp had suspected was slowly forming between the current and former Chancellors.

 _You do not get to be angry about this,_ she told herself firmly, as Abby finally found her shirt and pulled it briskly over her head. She still had not once looked over at Raven. _You do not have the right._

“Good morning,” came Kane’s cheerful voice as he entered with both breakfast and Jackson in tow. “Raven’s having a late morning, I see.”

“Did you sleep all right?” asked Jackson, brow furrowed slightly in concern, and Abby did look at Raven then, her face unreadable - watching to see what Raven would say.

“I slept fine,” she said finally, answering Jackson but not taking her eyes off Abby. “But I feel like shit this morning, to be honest.”

Abby looked away, surprised and a little hurt - _Good_ , thought Raven meanly -and busied herself with her breakfast.

“Jackson,” said Raven, reaching down to the floor beside her bed to grab her pants and shirt, which she pulled on beneath her covers while the visitors tactfully looked away. “Can you walk me over to the workshop?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Before PT? That’s a long walk without warming up first –“

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s important. I have to talk to Wick.”

“You have to talk to him _now_?” Jackson asked, surprised. Kane was giving her a funny look too.

“It’s about the power grid,” she said. “I just want to talk shop with him for a minute before you guys head out this afternoon.”

“Good idea,” said Kane, who seemed relieved she wasn’t pissed anymore. Abby still said nothing as Jackson helped Raven strap on the leg brace and held out his arm, guiding her gently out the door.

It was faster, with Raven’s bad leg, to go around the ship than through it, so even though the ground of Camp Jaha was treacherous and rocky, she savored the brief heavenly respite of being outside, feeling the warm morning sun on her skin. She thanked Jackson and waved him off a few steps away from the workshop’s door, wanting to make sure he was long gone before she entered. Then she took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

“It’s open!” shouted Wick. She could hear clanging inside. She opened the door and stepped in. He looked up at her with some surprise and confusion – and more than a little wariness, given how they’d parted.

“I didn’t come here to throw things,” she said. “Or to sleep with you. Let’s just get those both out of the way right off the bat.”

“Nice to see you too,” he said easily, and she laughed. It had been easy, being with Wick, for awhile. Before it stopped. “So if you didn’t come here to bang or to yell at me, what can I do for you?”

“I need help,” she said. “I need you and I need Bellamy. It’s really important.” She felt the telltale pressure of tears mounting behind her eyes and clenched her fists until they turned white, swallowing the tears back down. “It’s really important,” she said.

Wick looked at her curiously, then pulled out two chairs. “Sit,” he said, helping her into one. “Talk.”

“You leave today for Mount Weather, right?” she said. “The power grid.”

“Look, I wanted you to come too,” he said a little defensively, “It wasn’t my idea that –“

She waved him off. “Save it,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“What do you need?”

“I need you to stall,” she said.

“What?”

“Stall,” she said. “Stall Kane. I need a week before you guys go up there to fix the power grid.”

“Girl, one week ain’t enough time,” Wick said, not unkindly. “Your leg’s not gonna be better by then.”

“I know.”

“So then –“

“The grid schematics,” she said, interrupting him. “You’ve looked them over?” He nodded. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a two-month project,” he said. “Minimum. More likely three. We’ll just barely make it before the ground freezes and we can’t dig anymore. A month for the road-clearing, at least. There’s nothing in the way of industrial farming equipment at Mount Weather, since they didn’t go outside. It’ll be axes and shovels. But it’ll take at least that long, if not longer, to splice into the power relay from the dam and get it ready to lay cable. Not to mention, we’re going to need to be pulling water pipe and electrical parts from all over the bunker. I mean we’re gonna need to raze one whole floor of Mount Weather down to the ground to get enough materials to get water and electricity down to the camp.”

Raven nodded. “You'll probably have a team based up at the camp full-time, right? Instead of hiking back and forth?”

Wick nodded. “You’d have to,” he said. “We’re going to need at least a dozen people up there the whole time. People with brains.”

“And it’d sure go a lot faster, wouldn’t it,” said Raven, “if one of those brains up there was mine.”

“If you’re hoping I can take a run at building you a sturdier brace –“

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I need more than that.”

“What do you need?”

 _I need to get out of Abby's way so she can be happy,_ she thought.  _I need to not be here when she realizes Kane's the one she wants.  I need to get out of this fucking camp.  I need three months to do my job and clear my head.  I need to not have feelings for Abby Griffin right now._

"What do you need, Raven?" he asked again, interrupting her thoughts.

She looked him dead in the eye and told him. 

"I need another way up the mountain."

_ _

_Finn is still there when she comes back. She wants to hate Finn, a little, but she can’t. And she hates the part of herself that wants to. He’s done nothing wrong. He’s loyal to Raven, he’s a good kid, he seems fond of Clarke. It’s petty and cruel of Abby – who is technically, of course, the “other woman” in this scenario – to be jealous or resentful of a boy two decades younger than her because she still feels some mysterious, unquantifiable something for Raven._

_But Raven doesn’t want Abby, she wants Finn. She strapped on a zero-G suit and crashed to earth in a century-old tin can to find him. And now he’s here. And Abby can’t get rid of him, even though she wants to, and the wanting to makes her feel like a monster._

_“How are you feeling?” is all she can think of to say as she enters the makeshift hospital room rigged up inside the broken shell of the crashed Alpha Station._

_“Awesome,” quips Raven, trying to sound casual, but her heart’s not in it. Her skin is white and damp with sweat, and her voice is little more than a croak._

_“She’s lying,” says Finn, a little unnecessarily, but neither of the women are listening to him._

_“I know that face,” says Raven. “Just spit it out, Abby.”_

_There’s a reason, in medical school, why one of the first rules you learn is never to treat your own loved ones and family members. Doctors have to deliver bad news, all the time. They have to tell people they’re facing a long illness, or that they can’t have children, or that their injury is more severe than they hoped. It’s hard enough to do with strangers. But telling that to someone you love is unbearable. That’s why you’re not supposed to do it._

_But Abby is the only surgeon on the ground. She can’t afford to feel anything for Raven Reyes right now. Raven doesn’t need her heart. She needs her brain, and her hands. She needs Abby to be the doctor._

_Finn is the one she loves. Abby is just her doctor, and maybe her friend. That’s all._

_That’s all._

_“The bullet is still shifting,” she tells Raven, willing her voice to sound professional and calm. “That's why you're in pain. I was hoping that it would stabilize by now.”_

_“So how about you take it out?” suggests Raven, gritting her teeth through pain._

_“Raven, we need to talk about that,” Abby says gently. “The bullet is pressing on your spine. If we leave it in, you'll live, but –“_ Just say it, Abby, you have to tell her, just say it _– “you'll never walk again.”_

_“And take it out?”_

_“The surgery could kill you,” says Abby, and it’s the hardest thing she’s ever said out loud in her life, because she can’t say it without thinking it. She can’t form the words in her mouth without the picture entering her mind. Raven, bleeding out on the operating table under Abby’s hands._

_Another person she cares about, gone. Because of her. Because she failed. Because she couldn’t save them._

Please _, she begs Raven silently, knowing it’s already hopeless._ Please say no to the surgery.

_“We have no equipment,” she says aloud, a little desperately, hoping it will convince her. “We have no anesthesia.”_

_Raven isn’t fazed. “Will I walk again?” is all she asks._

_“Maybe,” Abby answers her carefully, unwilling either to lie or to give false hope, “but you'd be awake the whole time. You'd feel everything.”_ And I would have to hear you scream. I would be causing you pain. Please, please, don’t ask me to hurt you.

_“Sign me up,” says Raven, just like Abby always knew she would._

_“Wait,” says Finn urgently, and Abby blesses him for it. “Raven, you could die.”_

Yes, Raven, _Abby pleads silently._ You could die. Listen to Finn. Listen to me. Listen to the people who – who care about you.

 _But it’s useless. Raven shakes her head._ “ _In Zero G I didn't need my legs,” she says, and her voice is heartbreaking. “Down here, I do.” She looks up at them both, daring Abby to contradict her. “Take it out.”_

_# # #_

_Finn stays right there, by Raven’s side, as Jackson carefully marks a dotted line around the sprawling purple-and-green bruise where Abby will make the first incision. It’s right at the curve of Raven’s waist. Abby’s hands and mouth have been there. She tries not to think of it. She tries not to remember the last time this much of Raven Reyes’ skin was bared before her. She will never be able to slide the scalpel through that caramel skin and block out the sound of Raven’s screaming if she can’t stop thinking about that night in the Tavern._

_“We’re almost ready,” she says, leaning down to speak low, in what she hopes is a comforting voice, into Raven’s ear. Raven is pale and feverish and her lower lip is trembling as she struggles to choke down her rising panic, and Abby can’t stop herself from stroking the girl’s hair. She wants to kiss her. She wants to kiss her so badly. But Finn is there, and Jackson is there, and she is Doctor Abigail Griffin and there is literally no other person on this planet with a better chance of getting Raven through this surgery alive, so she cannot feel anything for Raven right now. She is a patient. That’s all._

_“Do you want me to talk?” offers Finn nervously. “Or just shut up?” And there’s something so desperate in his voice that Abby can’t hate him anymore, she can’t be jealous or angry – if she ever really was – because he’s just a scared kid, too, they’re all scared kids, and they’re looking to her and to Kane and to all the others to find their friends, to protect them from the Grounders, to make everything right, and she doesn’t know if she can do it. Finn is trying, he is trying so hard to be what Raven needs, he is trying so hard to be strong for her, and it’s impossible for Abby not to want to take them all in her arms, every one of them, and hold them close and make promises she can’t keep about protecting them all._

You can’t fix everything, Abby, _says a voice inside her head, and she starts, recognizing it as Jake’s._ You can’t do it all. But you can do one thing at a time.

_One thing at a time._

_The first thing is slicing into the skin of Raven Reyes’ back with her scalpel._

_Jackson has rigged up a pair of old seatbelts from the drop ship and attached them to the makeshift operating table, strapping Raven in so that even if she screams and flinches in pain, she won’t be able to move. It’s horrible but necessary – the slightest disturbance and Abby could sever an artery._

_She has stalled enough. It’s time. She takes a deep breath, presses the scalpel down against Raven’s skin, and –_

_“Stop!” cries Raven, and Abby almost drops the scalpel._ Maybe it’s not too late to call it off, _she thinks._ Maybe Raven will change her mind. Maybe I won’t have to do this. _She can feel Jackson’s warm, concerned eyes flickering from doctor to patient and back again, worried about them both._

_“I’m so scared,” whispers Raven in a broken voice, and Abby can’t comfort her, Abby can’t be the soft and gentle one right now, Abby is about to pierce the skin of Raven’s back and pry a bullet off her spine, and so she finds herself achingly, fervently grateful in that moment for Finn, who suddenly becomes the most important person in the room. “Look at me,” he says to Raven firmly, calmly, stroking her hair and clasping her hand tightly in his. “Okay? Just keep looking at me.” After a long, terrible moment, Raven finally swallows hard and nods._

_Finn looks up at Abby. Abby looks at Finn._

_She wonders what he knows. She wonders what he sees on her face as she looks down at Raven’s body on the operating table. But there is time for all that later. Right now, the three of them, they are a team. Finn, Jackson, Abby. They are all in this together. They are here to save Raven._

_Nothing else matters._

_Everything else can wait._

_“She's ready,” says Finn, nodding at Abby._

No, she isn’t, _Abby wants to say._ She has no idea what’s about to happen. _But she doesn’t say it. Instead she places her scalpel neatly at the marked spot, makes a flawless incision, and begins to slice Raven open, doing the best she can not to hear the girl screaming._


	4. "I Will Catch Your Fall"

 It was clear to Raven that Wick believed her sense of urgency was purely and simply because she didn’t want him taking apart the electrical grid without her – or, perhaps, she didn’t want him getting the credit. It galled her, letting him believe that, but it was miles safer than the truth.

She was a fraction of a degree more forthcoming with Bellamy – but then, she had to be. Bellamy’s parts of the plan were, arguably, more important even than Wick’s. He had to understand.

The idea had come into her head long before Mount Weather, but she had forgotten it in the weeks leading up to the battle, when so many other things had been happening and there had been so much more for her to do. But she had heard the story – everyone had heard the story – of Bellamy and Octavia finding Lincoln again, in his tortured Reaper state, underground near Mount Weather.

In an abandoned, ninety-seven-year-old parking garage.

Which was still full of cars.

Raven had converted a century-and-a-half-old Russian tin can into an escape pod functional enough to get her from the Ark to Earth more or less in one piece, and she’d done it in a little over a week. Surely hot-wiring a dead gasoline-powered car to make it run on electricity could be done in the same amount of time. Or even less.

So the plan was this. Wick would stall the Mount Weather trip – had, in fact, already done so, by means of the simple expedient of crashing the long-distance comm system they were going to set up for Raven, and then fixing it as slowly as was humanly possible. Kane was vexed, but not hopelessly so; a week wouldn’t set them back too far, so he hadn’t fought Wick on it. “Just let me know when we’re ready,” he had said, and left Wick to it.

Raven hadn’t figured out how to convince Jackson to let her go on a trip that would take her nearly a day’s walk, so she decided that the simplest course of action was to ask forgiveness rather than permission, and just took off the next morning before Abby was awake, leaving a brief note saying she needed fresh air and had gone out for the day with Bellamy. Wick came along too. They insisted on not letting her carry any of her own supplies, which was grating, but then again she was the one who was forcing the whole trip to go at half-speed – they’d have made it there in four hours without her slowing them down – and she had to spend the last few hours of the trip leaning heavily on Bellamy’s arm. Her leg only cramped three times, which to her felt like a miracle, but scared the boys half to death. She talked Bellamy through the leg massage, though, and the second and third times he was ready. Even Raven, who could barely tolerate help when it was offered her by medical professionals, had to admit that he did a good job.

It was infuriating, needing them. Needing anyone. But they were doing the best they could for her. And it wasn’t their fault that she hated this broken body of hers so much that she wanted to break things and scream and yell. They hadn’t done anything wrong.

So she let Wick carry her tools, and she let Bellamy take her arm, and she tried to be grateful.

They arrived at the garage a little before nightfall. Raven was superstitiously glad there was still a hint of light outside by the time they got there, even though they were plunged into darkness as soon as they entered the concrete tunnel. It was a spooky place – not so much for fear of the Reapers, who were all gone, but because the cars themselves seemed to hold ghosts. The people who had driven these vehicles had been dead for a century, wiped out in the middle of whatever they were doing by the radiation blast. She tried very hard not to think about that.

They walked from car to car, shining their flashlights inside to see if they could get a sense of how the locking mechanisms worked. They rejected a few that were too small to be useful for hauling supplies, a few that were too wide for the rough-hewn walking trails that were currently the only way up the mountain – “if this works, we’ll come back for one of the big ones once Kane’s road goes in,” Bellamy promised her – and one that looked perfect save for the skeleton of a large dog in the back seat, which made Raven feel so ill she had to sit down for a minute.

Finally they found a dingy but hardy-looking maroon pickup truck, parked in the corner of the lot. It had a narrow enough chassis for the trail, a cabin that could seat two – three in a pinch – and a bed wide enough to haul a considerable load of supplies up or down the mountain. Bellamy looked it over, then nodded, satisfied.

“All right,” he said. “I approve. Now go do your thing.”

# # #

Bellamy made camp while Wick and Raven tinkered in mostly amicable silence. Wick had carted along a very small portable generator which – if this “crackpot notion,” as he described it (but not without affection) actually worked – would get them enough power to make it back to camp, where he could hook the car up to charge its battery from the main generator, run off the Alpha Station’s solar panels. Bellamy eventually went to sleep, stretched out on one of the bedrolls he had packed, but woke with a start at around four in the morning to the sound of ecstatic shrieks of delight, high-fives, and the sound of an engine turning over.

“Holy shit, Reyes, we did it!” Wick exclaimed.

“We did it!” she agreed, and the pure delight of fixing something broken made her feel so alive that she could almost, almost forget the hollow in her heart that was the reason _why_ she needed this car in the first place.

They let the car charge for another hour, which Wick said was enough time to get enough juice in it for the trip back to camp. Wick climbed into the bed of the truck with the supplies, with Raven behind the wheel so she could give Bellamy his first driving lesson.

He was a quick study, and though she wouldn’t let him actually drive the thing yet – the car had only been hers for a few hours and yet she was already desperately in love with it – he watched her carefully and asked the right questions. They drove through the misty, hazy light of dawn back towards the camp, Wick snoring lightly in the bed of the truck behind them, and that was when Raven finally took a deep breath and gritted her teeth and explained to Bellamy what his second part of the plan actually was.

Raven had to disappear. Raven had to get herself up to Mount Weather, damaged leg or not, by the end of the week. She had to prove to Kane and the rest of the team that she was ready, that she was an asset, that they couldn’t tackle this project without her. Well, the car solved both those problems; she had her own transportation now, which she could work with only her one good leg, and which would make her invaluable for the trip up, saving the whole team from having to haul their own supplies. She’d more than earned her place on the crew. And Wick was ready to vouch for her; he wanted her help on the electrical grid project as much as she wanted to do it.

But none of that meant anything unless Kane stayed behind.

So Bellamy’s job – as one-fourth of the New Council – was to convince Kane to stay at camp with Abby, while Bellamy himself coordinated the Mount Weather team.

Because none of this would matter unless Raven could give Abby what she needed – could give her the only thing that would make her happy.

She would leave for three months, to go move into the mountain bunker with Bellamy and Sinclair and Wick and Monty. She would have a job, and a purpose. She would fix the broken things. She would make the camp a place for them to live. Really live. A place to build new lives.

And then she would come back, and Abby would be with Kane, Abby would have what she wanted, what she needed – even if she didn’t know it. She would have a partner who could support her, somebody strong at her side. Not a broken, damaged mechanic whose leg would never work right, who could never be anything more to Abby than a burden. No, it should be Kane. Kane was what she needed. They were right for each other. This was the right thing to do.

“Promise me,” she said to Bellamy. “Kane stays, you go. Promise me you’ll convince him.”

“Will you tell me why?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. But it’s important. That’s all I can tell you. It’s really, really important.”

He didn’t press her further, just gave her a long, puzzled look before finally nodding slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “I promise.”

Raven breathed a sigh of relief, leaning her head back against the seat cushions behind her. She was willing to do the hard thing, she really was. She was willing to sacrifice herself for Abby’s happiness, so Abby and Kane could be together.

She just couldn’t quite bear to stay and watch.

_“Abby,” says Raven in an exasperated tone, distracted by the movement over her shoulder as she installs the pressure regulator. “How about I pace in the operating room next time you’re working?”_

_“Sorry,” says Abby sheepishly, and sits down on the floor next to the pod. For a few silent moments, she watches Raven work. But she can’t keep still, and the insistent tapping of her fingertips on the concrete floor is only a fraction less distracting than the pacing was, and Raven lets out an exasperated sigh._

_“I’m going as fast as I can,” she fires back._

_“I know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just –“_

_“I get it, Abby, I do,” she says, twisting the last bolt home and testing the conductor tubes to make sure the seals will hold._

_“If Kane finds out –“_

_“We’ll be out of here long before that,” she assures her with a grin. “We’re ready to go.”_

_They look at each other for a long moment. They realize . . . it worked._

_It_ worked.

_Neither of them is ready to be jubilant yet – not until they’re on the ground – but neither of them has been able to shake the terror that something would happen to stop them both strapping themselves into that pod and launching into space, but they’re here, the moment has arrived, it’s time, everything worked._

_Abby rises to her feet, wraps her arms tightly around Raven, presses a grateful kiss against her mouth, and the heat stirs between them, but there’s no time, they can’t do this now, they will need to wait for later, though neither one of them wants to think too hard about the fact that “later” will have Finn Collins in it or about what that will mean._

_But for now – for right now – the escape pod is ready to launch._

_Abby climbs into the passenger seat and closes the hatch behind her, bolting it like Raven showed her. Raven climbs into the pilot’s side. They fasten their seatbelts. Raven flips the power switch. They hold their breath._

_And then there is a snapping sound, and a furious hiss of steam like a whole army of angry snakes is trapped in the pod with them, and the needle on the pressure regulator is going crazy, and suddenly Raven knows._

_They’re not getting to Earth in this thing._

_Nygel’s last act of revenge is a flawless one. Neither of them saw it coming._

_"Dammit!” Raven snaps, slamming her fist against the wall of the pod._

_Abby doesn’t have to ask. She knows. “She gave us a bad part,” she says softly, and Raven nods._

_For a long moment, they just sit there in the pod, leaning their heads back against the headrests._ _Dammit, dammit, dammit,_ _thinks Raven fiercely. They were so close. Fucking Nygel. What a fucking asshole. Raven wants to wring her neck until that smug, serene little smile is wiped clean off it._

_She’s so immersed in her revenge fantasy about Nygel that she doesn’t notice for a long moment that Abby has gotten out of the pod and placed something onto her seat._

_It’s Raven’s zero-gravity suit._

_“Only one of us needs to get to the ground, Raven,” says Abby. “The second you find those kids, you radio back. Three hundred innocent people will die if you don’t.”_

_Raven jumps out of the pod to face Abby. “I’m not going without you,” she insists, and she can’t keep the desperation from creeping into her voice._

_Abby shakes her head. “Go,” she says softly. “Go find my daughter. Go bring us all home, Raven. Go breathe air and taste raindrops and then tell us all about it. So they’ll know.” She swallows hard. “Go be with Finn.”_

_Raven’s head jerks up sharply, and she stares at Abby in shock, watching the tears flow down the older woman’s cheeks._

_“Abby –“ she says, but stops herself, not sure how to go on._

_“Raven, you have to go.”_

_“What if I never see you again?”_

_“Finn’s down on the ground, Raven,” says Abby softly. “It was always Finn. He was always the one you wanted. This – you and me – this was never real. It’s okay, Raven. It’s okay. Go find Finn. Go be with the boy you love.”_

_Raven’s heart goes cold and heavy at this. “So you – you don’t –“ But she can’t get the words out. They taste bitter and metallic in her mouth. Ugly words. She can’t finish this sentence. She can’t bear to hear the answer._

_Abby laughs, a harsh little laugh with no mirth in it._

_“Would that make this any better?” she says sadly. “All right, then. No. I don’t. I don’t care for you, Raven. I feel nothing for you, nothing at all. I never did. I never could. There’s nothing between us. Now go be with Finn. How is that? Did that help?”_

_But she never gets to hear what Raven has to say because in two long strides Raven is right there, pulling Abby into her arms and kissing her, and the way Abby melts into her and parts her warm mouth and kisses her back tells Raven those words are a lie._

_As if Raven needed to be told._

_“Dammit, Raven,” Abby whispers, pulling apart so she could breathe. “This won’t make it any easier.”_

_“I don’t want easy,” she murmurs back, pressing her mouth into the hollow of Abby’s throat. “I want you.”_

_“We can’t –“ Abby starts to say, but breaks off into a gasp as Raven’s hands on her grow bolder, tugging at the button of her jeans and pushing the soft fabric of her shirt up her torso. “Raven, baby, we can’t.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“Because I’m afraid I’ll never see you again,” breathes Abby, and Raven freezes. Once the words are out, the floodgates open, and tears flow freely down Abby’s face. “Because I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever cared about, Raven, and I’m terrified to lose you too.”_

_“You’ll never lose me.”_

_“Raven, it’s over,” she pleads. “It has to be over. There’s only two things that can happen next. One, we bring the Exodus ship to Earth, all of us, together, and then I’ve put you in the position of having to choose between me and Finn, which is an impossible and unfair thing to ask of you.”_

_“Or?”_

_“There are so many things that could go wrong,” Abby says in a heavy voice. “The tiniest course alteration in orbit could send us thousands of miles off course. The ship could end up on another continent.” She swallows hard, takes Raven’s hand. “I could land an ocean away from you,” she says desperately. “I could end up so far away that we could travel the rest of our lives and never reach each other.”_

_“And so you wanted to shove me into my zero-G suit and into the escape pod with barely a goodbye, as though that would make it easier?” Raven kisses her again, long and sweet and slow, and now there are tears in her eyes too. “Don’t you think I’m scared of losing you too?”_

_“Raven –“_

_“Abby, they’ll float you,” says Raven, and Abby is silent. “We’re not talking about the Exodus ship crashing to Earth too far away for us to find each other. You could die.”_

_“Then float me,” says Abby defiantly. “It will be worth it if it gets you to Earth.”_

_“Not to me,” says Raven. “Not if it means losing you.”_

_“This was always how this story ended, Raven,” says Abby. “There’s no happy ending for us. This isn’t a children’s story. This is the Ark. The best we can do is get you to Earth – get you back to Finn – and get the ship to the ground.”_

_Everything is silent. Everything is still._

_Raven’s entire body is coiled tense with her desire for those words not to be true, but she can’t hold out any longer. There is only one zero-G suit. Abby would never survive the trip with the pressure regulator fucked this badly._

_Raven is going to Earth alone._

_“Abby,” she says softly, and she can’t get any more words out than that, but it’s okay, because everything she needs to say is there. Abby’s face crumples a little, and she takes Raven in her arms one last time, breathes her in deeply – the scent of her hair, the softness of her golden skin, the feel of her chest rising and falling against Abby’s own. There are tears on both their cheeks. Finally Abby pulls back, and takes Raven’s hands in both of her own, desperately fighting to stay firm and strong, desperate not to fall apart._

_“Tell Clarke I love her,” she says, her voice cracking so badly she can hardly get the words out, and Raven nods her head, not trusting her own voice to speak._

_Raven presses her eyes closed to force back the tears._

_When she opens them, Abby is gone._


	5. "Your Secret Heart"

Raven had been running on adrenaline most of the night, trying to get the car up and running, so by the time she snuck back into the brig, about an hour before Abby usually woke up, her leg was absolute agony. The thought of morning PT with Jackson in just two hours made her want to die. Maybe she’d fake sick to get out of it, she thought, opening the door as quietly as she could to avoid waking Abby. It was still dark in the brig, which got no natural light when the outer doors were closed, so she was all the way inside and halfway to her bunk before she saw Abby standing in the shadows, watching her.

“Jesus, you scared me,” she said. Abby’s face was a mask of stone.

“I scared _you_?” she repeated coldly. “ _I_ scared _you_?”

“Abby, what are –“

“Where the hell did you go, Raven?”

“I was out doing a thing with Bellamy,” she said, pulling off her clothes and climbing into bed. “It took a little longer than we thought, that’s all.”

“Doing a thing with Bellamy,” said Abby flatly, and she gave a hollow laugh. “Wow. You work fast.”

Raven sat bolt upright. There was something ugly in Abby’s tone that startled her. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked suspiciously.

“You know exactly what it means.”

“Honest to God, Abby, I really don’t.”

“Never mind,” Abby snapped. “You can do whatever the hell you want. I don’t even know why I bother.”

“I don’t either,” said Raven irritably. “But you sure always manage to find something to disapprove of.”

“Disapprove is hardly the word –“

“Look, I’m sorry I was out all day walking on my bad leg, I know, I know, it was irresponsible, blah blah femoral shaft, I _know,_ and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I’d be gone, but I didn’t think I had to like check in or anything, I did leave a note –“

“Are you kidding me?” Abby stared at her, face dark with astonished fury. “Are you kidding me, Raven? You think I’m upset about your fucking leg?”

“Abby –“

“You’re a goddamn adult, Raven, you’re in charge of your own damn leg. You want to go run laps around Camp Jaha, I won’t stop you. But if you expect me not to feel anything about the fact that you ran off to spend the night with Bellamy Blake after we –“

She stopped short, unable to get the rest of the words out. Raven stared at her.

“Abby –“

“Shut up,” said Abby fiercely. “Just – God, just don’t say anything. Don’t say _anything,_ Raven. I’m not having this fight right now. Clearly that night meant nothing to you, I don’t know why I thought it would be any different – I don’t know why I thought after all this time –“

“Oh my God,” exclaimed Raven in exasperation, _“I did not sleep with Bellamy!”_

“You just told me you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You said you were out ‘doing a thing’ with Bellamy and ‘it took you all night.’”

“I wasn’t speaking in code, Abby. I was helping Bellamy with a mechanical thing. It took all night.”

“What was it?”

“I went back to the tunnels,” she said, “to the underground Reaper caves. With Wick and Bellamy. And I brought back a car.”

Abby stared.

“A car.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, a car?”

“I mean a car. Well, a truck. Wick and I fixed it up. We got it back to camp on a partial charge, from Wick’s shitty little travel generator, but he’s gonna hook it up to the main relay in the morning. So I can get up the mountain.”

“You walked all the way to the underground parking garage with Wick and Bellamy to bring back a car,” said Abby in befuddlement, “just so Kane wouldn’t start on the electrical grid repairs without you?”

“No,” said Raven, “I did it for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was a present for you,” she said flatly. “It was me getting the hell out of your way, so you can be happy.”

“Raven, what are you talking about?”

Raven found that she couldn’t quite look at Abby anymore, so she lay down in the bunk, burrowed under the covers, and turned her back away from Abby. “Kane doesn’t need to go,” she said. “Not for three months. Bellamy can run it. I’m going up to the mountain with the repair crew. Kane should stay.” She closed her eyes and let the tears come – since, after all, Abby couldn’t see them. “Kane should be with you,” she said. “I’ll go.”

“Raven,” said Abby, and her voice was both gentler and nearer. Raven felt a hand on her hair. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“You unmade the bed,” said Raven.

“I – what?”

“Yesterday morning,” she said. “After we – well. After. You got up first and you unmade your bed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I woke up,” said Raven, still not looking at her, trying desperately to ignore the persistent, gentle hand stroking her hair. She pressed her eyes tightly shut. _Just say it, just get through this, she_ thought. _Abby doesn’t know this is what she needs, so you’re going to have to be the one to say it._

She tried again.

“You unmade your own bed,” she said. “So that when Kane came in with breakfast it wouldn’t look like we’d slept together. You didn’t want him to know.” Tears streaked down her cheeks as she stared furiously at the wall. “You regretted it,” she said. “I’m not the one you want. That’s okay. I get it. But I – I care about – about you being happy –“

“And so you sent Bellamy to coerce Kane into rearranging the team assignments,” said Abby, “and you walked sixteen miles on an injured leg, and you roped Wick into spending the night helping you _rewire a hundred-year-old car -_ all because it didn’t occur to you that I might have woken up in the middle of the night with a leg cramp and gone back to my own bunk so I could let you sleep.”

Raven turned around.

“You – wait, what?”

“I had a leg cramp,” Abby said again. “I didn’t want to wake you up. It had nothing to do with Kane.”

Raven looked at Abby.

Abby looked at Raven.

“You were going to leave,” said Abby softly. “You were going to leave me for three months. Without a word.”

“I thought –“

“You thought I could get through this without you?” Abby murmured, as she shifted her weight to lie down on the narrow bed beside Raven, pulling her close. “You’ve never been more wrong about anything in your life.”

_She paces back and forth, feeling her entire body alive with anxious tension. She needs to get out. She needs to get out of the brig. She is as restless as a caged animal. The sound of the door opening, of footsteps entering – of human contact besides the armed guards and the irritatingly placid Chancellor Jaha reclining coolly beside her – stops her heart._

_Raven says her name, and there is a year’s worth of emotion in those four letters._

_“Abby.”_

_But Abby’s entire body is coiled tight like a bowstring, she is so angry that her fury feels like a palpable thing, like a thick black cloud that enters the room with her._

_“Abby,” she says urgently, “let me out of here. Please. It was stupid. I’m sorry.”_

_And what did she think would happen next? Did she really think that Abby would just shrug and gesture towards the door and let her stroll back out? Did she really think there wouldn’t be consequences?_

_No. Of course there are. Of_ course _Abby says what she says next._

_“I don’t want to hear it.”_

For fuck’s sake, _thinks Raven,_ this is _classic_ Abby. _Of course Abby slams the door shut. Of_ course _she does. Abby Griffin always knows best, for everyone. Abby Griffin never backs down. Her voice is flat and cold and Raven finds herself growing defensive._ Christ, you never listen, _she cries out silently, as the two of them stare each other down._

_Their faces are very close together. The electricity is still there._

_It will always be there._

_There will never be a time, Raven realizes, when she does not feel her heart and mind and body responding, even against her will, when Abby is this close to her. It is not possible for her to shut it down, to feel nothing._

_But she has to shut it down. She_ has _to. Because now there is Finn to consider._

_She has to do right by Finn._

_“He was ready to throw Finn out of the gate,” she fires back at Abby. Why are they even arguing about this?_

_“And you think I would let that happen?” Abby snaps, and the tangle of emotions in her voice is startling, disorienting, and all of a sudden Raven understands. Abby is not angry at Raven for breaking the rules, for sending Finn on the run. Abby is not angry about the Grounder truce being in jeopardy._

_Abby isn’t angry at all._

_She is_ crushed.

_Raven helped Finn escape because she didn’t have faith that Abby would save him._

_And Abby knows it._

Yes, _a part of Raven thinks apologetically._ Yes, I did. I _did_ think you would let that happen. I _did_ think you would let him die. Because if I were you and you were me, if it were your lover and not mine standing between us and peace with the Grounders . . . what would be my choice?

Do I love anyone enough to be that selfless?

 _“I don’t know,” she finally says, and inside Abby’s eyes, something crumbles. Hope, maybe. The last flicker of hope that Raven has retained some faith in her. Gone, now. The thoughts in her mind are as stark and clear to Raven as if they had been written in black letters across her skin._ Raven thinks I would send the boy she loves to be tortured and killed, _Abby is thinking._ Raven thinks I am that lawless, that cold, that cruel. Raven thinks I care about her so little that I would break her heart without a second thought.

Raven thinks I have no heart at all.

_It is excruciating. Raven can no longer look straight at her._

_“No,” says Raven finally, half a statement and half a question, and the dark thing in Abby’s eyes fades just a little._

_Maybe, just maybe, there is the faintest ember still burning._

_“The only way we’re going to make it through this,” Abby says softly, “is if we trust each other.”_

_“I’m trying,” whispers Raven._

_The air around them is suddenly thick, almost stifling, with all the things they cannot say to each other. Not just because someone could hear them – Jaha, the guards, the rest of the camp outside – but because the words themselves are too dangerous, too frightening. There is too much at stake._

_After all, Raven realizes, there is only really one word for it when you’re willing to risk the safety of all the people around you to keep one person from getting hurt._

_But right now that person – this is important – is not Finn Collins._

_Abby cares about all her people. Abby cares about everyone. Her heart is vast and there is room for everyone inside it and she wants the 48 protected from harm at all costs. She does not want anything to happen to these kids who mean so much to her daughter, who were too young for the things they had been forced to endure because she voted to send them down here. No, Abby does not want any harm to befall Finn Collins at the hands of the Grounders._

_But as Raven looks at Abby, feels the urgent tug of gravity between them, this is what she knows:_

_They would both be lying to themselves if they did not admit that Abby is not doing this for Finn._

_What do you call it when someone matters so much to you that you risk everything to save the life of the person they have chosen to be with instead of you?_

_There has only ever been one word for it._

_And Raven Reyes knows exactly what it is._


	6. "Let My Love Throw a Spark"

Abby’s leg was bothering her again.

Raven could tell from the way her sleep was restless and her breathing unsteady.  The injury was definitely healing - they both were - but it was agonizing and slow. The truck could make the trip to Mount Weather in an afternoon - less, once the team finished clearing the roads - so Raven worked for three days out of each week and then came home for four.  The whole team rotated, in fact; Kane and Bellamy switched off supervising the dam crew and the road crew, and Sinclair swapped with Miller for half the week.  Raven's truck - which only she and Bellamy were permitted to drive - had singlehandedly prevented the camp from being forcibly split apart for months at a time.  And once the road was cleared, Bellamy had promised her she could have another one.

At the end of the month, Jackson finally relented and allowed them both to move back to their own quarters again.  Or, more accurately, Abby moved back to Abby's own quarters . . . and so did Raven. 

She kept all her stuff in the workshop, where her bed and clothes were, but from the moment they left the brig she spent three nights a week in the dormitories of Mount Weather with the rest of the electrical crew, and four nights a week in Abby's bed.  If the rest of the camp knew, nobody said anything.  Neither, in fact, did Abby.  It just happened.  And then once it had happened, it kept happening, until neither of them could sleep without the other one in bed next to her.  If Abby had a night shift, Raven tossed and turned until she came upstairs.  If Raven was stuck in her workshop until the wee hours, Abby would sit up with a book, or sleep in Raven's cot while the girl worked.  On the nights Raven was up at Mount Weather, they talked quietly on the long-distance comms while they drifted off to sleep.

They didn't say anything.  They just slowly merged together.

That was how Raven knew that Abby's leg was bothering her. 

Raven had gotten good at massaging it for her, easing Abby's pain.  She wasn't quite as deft with her hands as Abby was - it worked much more quickly when Abby did it to her, though Raven would always rather pretend like she didn't need it.

She sat up in bed and drew the covers back from Abby’s body so she could reach the scar on Abby’s bare thigh where the drill went in.

For a moment, she just rested her hand on it – on the wound that marked both their bodies. One on fair skin, one on dark skin, but identical.

All their wounds were the same. All their scars were in the same places.

Raven’s hands were strong, and Jackson had taught her well.  He had seen, before anyone else had, what had begun to happen between the two of them down there in the brig.  And because he was Jackson - because this is was why Abby loved him - he had not even blinked an eye.  He had simply asked Abby to lay down on her bunk and had helped her remove her jeans and had shown Raven very carefully where Abby's leg muscles were likely to cramp up, and how to massage the tension out of the muscles while helping restore Abby's circulation by gently raising and lowering the leg, and explained to her that it was important to watch for irregularities in Abby's sleep patterns because problems could arise in the middle of the night.

He gave a variant of the same lecture to Abby - though of course, she didn't need to be taught how to massage Raven's leg - but he reminded her that Raven's pre-existing injury put her at even higher risk for circulation problems and that they should put extra pillows at the bottom of their bed because they were both still supposed to be keeping their legs elevated.

"Bed."  Not "beds." 

And that was the end of it.

It had been strange, stepping out of that strange isolated world where no one existed besides her and Abby and sometimes Jackson, and reentering the rest of the camp where life had begun to take on new rhythms and patterns without them.  It was almost _less_ painful to be at Mount Weather, despite its ghosts, than it was sometimes in the camp, where everyone was trying to figure out how to put life back together.  Clarke was still missing and they still did not speak of it.  And the other wounds of battle - the less visible ones - were just as slow to heal as the holes drilled through Abby and Raven's bones.  Jasper could scarcely look at Monty, which broke Raven's heart a little.  Lincoln's eyes were haunted, and he spoke rarely except to Octavia.  Bellamy worked like a man possessed - he and Kane were seemingly everywhere, all at once, keeping the whole camp going - but it was impossible not to notice the fact that he was watching the front gates nearly all the time. 

Raven's own feelings about Clarke's return were decidedly mixed - she wanted Abby to be happy again, but for herself, she was perfectly content not to have to look at her for awhile, with the pain of Finn bubbling up again fresh and new as the 48 who had been his friends slowly, piece by piece, got the story of what had happened to him while they were inside the mountain.  Bellamy had done her a kindness and broken the news himself - done it, she suspected, in a way as compassionate towards Clarke as he possibly could - and had told them not to bring it up in front of her, but it was in their eyes when they looked at her, and she could feel them wanting to ask.  Monty and Harper were on the electrical grid repair crew with her, and every day she wondered if this would be the day that someone would say it out loud.

It got so she almost missed the brig.  At least there had been fewer questions.

But still, they woke up in the morning and got dressed and went to work - Abby to Medical, Raven to the workshop or to load up and drive off in the truck - and did their best to keep the camp running while forcing the thoughts of the people they had lost as far away from them as they could.

_Finn and Clarke._

_Clarke and Finn._

The relationship between the two of them, of course, however brief it had been, added yet another complication to whatever-the-hell-this-was unfolding between Raven and Abby.  _My boyfriend slept with your daughter,_ Raven would think to herself sometimes, the words so bizarre and nonsensical that they almost made her laugh.  What possible future could she have with Abby with such a bizarre, complicated past?

She pushed the thought away.  "Future" was too heavy a word for right now.  There was just now, there was just the present, there was just Abby in the bed beside her with the uneven, restless breathing of an injured woman who can't sleep.

She dug her fingers deep into the flesh of Abby’s thigh, waking her up with a start of pain. She felt the thigh tense under her hand, then relax slightly as Abby came back to herself and realized where she was.

“I’m sorry,” Abby murmured in a voice still throaty and rough from sleep. “Was I kicking you again?”

“It’s okay,” said Raven.

“It’s been bad all day,” said Abby, “I don’t know why.”

“You were on your feet since breakfast,” Raven reprimanded her gently. “Jackson would have taken that second surgery for you.”

“Jackson was on his feet all day too.”

“Jackson doesn't have a big damn hole in his leg.”

Abby laughed a little, conceding. Raven’s fingers worked deeply into the tissue of her leg and the painful knot slowly dissolved. For now, for this moment, the pain was gone. But Raven could feel that Abby did not yet want her to stop, so she kept going – a little gentler, now, hands roaming up and down Abby’s entire leg, then switching over to the other. Abby closed her eyes, and a soft sigh of pleasure escaped her.

There were things Raven wanted to say. But she wasn’t quite sure how to say them with words, not just yet. She was still not entirely sure how they ended up back here. So much time had passed and so many terrible things had happened since the first time she spent the night beside Abby Griffin and she did not quite trust this yet.  She didn't know how long it would take before she felt ready to begin pulling things out of the dark silence between them and holding them up in the light.

So the things she couldn't say with words, she said with her hands instead. The way they moved over Abby’s legs, which were taut and strong, soothing the tension out of her coiled muscles. The way they drifted back upwards, sliding flat over Abby’s soft skin, to press against the jut of her hipbones.

“Raven,” murmured Abby, opening her eyes to look at her. Raven was silent, hands firm on Abby’s skin, and then suddenly Abby’s arms were around her, hands tangled in Raven’s dark hair, warm soft mouth pressed hard against Raven’s own, and everything Raven wanted to say vanished entirely.

 * * * 

_“Did someone call for a mechanic?” Raven calls into the intercom, then stops short when the door opens and she sees Abby standing on the other side of it._

_Abby, who she hasn’t seen in nearly a year._

_Abby, who fled Raven’s bedroom that night so fast that she practically left a whirlwind behind her._

_Abby, who hasn’t gotten any less sexy over the last few –_ no, stop it, Raven, you can’t do this. Get it together.

_“You’re the one who called in the work order?” she asks, a little warily; the older woman appears in no mood for another drunken tryst, so whatever this is, it can’t be good._

_“We need to talk,” says Abby, ushering Raven in and closing the door behind her._

_Abby knows what Raven’s been up to. It’s obvious. She knows Raven has been snooping around, trying to find out why Finn is gone. Why the prison is empty. Why they lied about the quarantine._ What does Abby know that the rest of the Ark doesn’t? _Raven wonders as a chill prickles the back of her neck._ What happened?

Where the hell is Finn?

_“We sent the hundred to the ground,” says Abby. “You must have suspected that. You must have guessed.” Hearing it out loud is like a punch in the gut, even though it is the thing she expected Abby to say. “What you don’t know,” Abby continues in the same calm voice, “is why.”_

_Abby does not know about Finn Collins. Abby does not know why Raven’s terror about his fate is wrapped so tightly in guilt. It should have been Raven down there on the ground. No. That’s not true. Raven ought to be dead. If they’d known the Spacewalker was her, she’d have been floated._

_“The Ark is dying, Raven,” says Abby, jolting the girl out of her thoughts, and she stares in horror. “Life support is on its last legs. I have ten days to prove that Earth is survivable or they're gonna start reducing population. Three hundred and twenty innocent people will be killed.”_

_“Abby, I haven’t heard from you in months,” says Raven. “Why am I here? I don’t get it. Why are you telling me this?”_

_“Because I need you.”_

_“You said you never wanted to see me again. You were very clear.”_

_“Raven –“_

_“When I came by the next morning, when I came to visit you in Medical, you said –“_

_“I know what I said.”_

_“You said, ‘Last night never happened, and if you tell anyone it did, so help me God, I’ll have you floated.’ I’m not always the best at reading signals, but. You know. That one was pretty clear.”_

_“My daughter’s down there, Raven,” says Abby, and Raven shuts up. “Clarke is down there. She was one of the prisoners. She’s – I don’t know if –“ She stops, swallows hard, tries to collect herself. “We sent them with wrist trackers,” she explains. “For their vital signs. They’ve been going out, a few of them. We don’t know if –“_

_“If they’re dying, or if they’re just taking the trackers off,” finishes Raven. Abby nods. “So what do you need me for?”_

_“I read your file,” says Abby. “You’re the youngest zero-G mechanic on the Ark in fifty years.”_

_“Fifty-two,” corrects Raven, not sure how she feels about the fact that Abby went looking for her and hiding her mixed emotions with a deliberately casual cockiness. “But so what?”_

_“So,” says Abby, and that’s when Raven sees it. The hulking shape hidden beneath a gray tarp that Abby pulls down and away as Raven stares, eyes wide._

_Beneath the tarp is the oldest, grimiest, ugliest, most weather-beaten escape pod Raven’s ever seen. More than a century out of date. It’s bulky and oddly-shaped, lacking the sleekness of NASA’s later models; this one looks Russian, all blunt-edged and square-jawed. It’s hideous._

_Raven falls in love with it instantly._

_She’s not sure why the Ark’s doctor has an antique escape pod, but all she wants to do is run back to her workshop, grab her toolbox, and take this clunky old relic apart to see what makes it tick._

_“You have nine days to get this ready so I can survive a drop,” says Abby, and Raven whirls around to stare at her._

_“Abby, you can’t be serious.”_

_“My daughter’s down there, Raven. You need to get me to the ground. I have to do this. We have to save those three hundred people. And I have to find Clarke. I have to know that she’s all right.”_

Finn, _says the voice in her head._ Finn is down there. This is your only way to get to Finn.

 _But she hesitates. Raven’s good at what she does – she knows she’s good – and she makes sure everyone else knows it, too. But what if she’s not quite_ this _good? What if her desire to get down to the ground and see Finn again is blinding her to the fact that she can’t turn a heap of scrap metal into a working drop ship in just under a week and a half?_

_What if she gets Abby killed?_

_What if another person she cares about suffers because she’s so goddamn cocky that she overestimates her own powers once again?_

_“God, what a piece of junk,” she says, running her hand over its surface. She’s stalling. She looks like she’s appraising it but she’s really just desperately trying to think. Can she do this? Can she really do this? “They must have found this thing when they salvaged MIR-3 in 2102,” she goes on. “You want me to get a hundred-and-thirty-year-old escape pod ready to stand up to the inferno of re-entry in_ nine days _?”_

_“Can you do it or not?” Abby almost snaps, and that does it, the direct challenge does it, same old Raven, nothing’s changed, she can’t possibly answer no to that question. Besides, she’s fallen in love with the beat-up old thing, and something in the way Abby is looking at her – something in the conspiratorial way Abby snuck Raven down here and the fact that this is clearly a secret illegal project Abby has told nobody else about – is infinitely appealing. Abby is breaking the law. She went looking for a partner in crime, and she picked Raven. Not just because she needed a mechanic._

_Because she needed a mechanic she could trust._

She trusts me _, Raven thinks to herself, almost in wonderment, and that does it. She can’t let Abby down now. Whatever else has passed between them, Abby’s daughter is down there with Finn, which means Abby and Raven understand each other in a way that right now nobody else does._

_Abby has entrusted the lives of three hundred and twenty people on the Ark – and a hundred more down on the ground, including her own daughter – to Raven’s mechanical engineering skills and ability to retrofit a piece of technology so old that its spare parts predate the technology available on the Ark by nearly forty years, so that it doesn’t burn Abby alive when she hits atmosphere._

_No pressure or anything._

_“Hell yes I can do it,” Raven finally says, with more confidence than she feels. “But I’m going with you.” Abby starts to protest, but Raven shuts her down. “You’re not the only one with someone you love on the ground,” she says, and she hadn’t meant it to be quite so obvious, she had meant only to remind Abby that there were ninety-nine other parents with kids in the prison blocks who had no idea what had happened to their daughters and sons, but Abby sees through it, Abby looks at her like a light switch has flipped on, and everything becomes clear._

_Abby understands everything._

_Abby knows what Raven was running from when they collided that night at the Tavern. She knows the source of the dark shadows inside Raven’s eyes, the frantic urgency with which Raven lost herself in bed, why she looked so desperately sad and lost when Abby grabbed her clothes and bolted._

_Abby still does not know Finn Collins’ name, but by now she has put together everything else._

_Someone Raven loves is in prison, and she carries the guilt of it. This is the missing piece._

We’re the same, _thinks Abby._ The wounds are the same.

_“All right,” says Abby finally. “You can come with me.” And it’s worth it for the way Raven’s eyes light up, the way her entire body comes to brilliant life in front of Abby, who suddenly realizes that she’s seeing Raven for the first time. Really seeing her, the way she ought to be seen._

_“You got yourself a mechanic,” she smiles happily at Abby, diving into the escape pod’s open door to get a better look at the controls, and Abby can’t help smiling back._

_Hope._

_That’s what this thing is. That’s what’s different. That’s the thing that Raven Reyes makes her feel._

_It was the same the last time. Abby was sunk into a dark abyss of despair, after losing her husband and seeing her daughter hauled off to prison. She was lost in a gray fog. And then along came Raven, with her deck of cards and her quick laugh and her remarkably deft mouth and hands, and the dead woman Abby had become suddenly came back to life again. There was just the tiniest spark of golden light inside the gray fog, but it was enough. It was enough for Abby to begin to find her way back home. It was enough to bring her back to life._

_And now here she is again. There are lives on the line, there’s Clarke down on the surface of the planet facing God knows what, and Abby’s back was against the wall, things had begun to look almost hopeless –_

_And then once again, Raven Reyes shines a light into the dark place, and suddenly things begin to feel . . ._

_Possible._

_# # #_

_Abby has an evening shift in Medical and leaves Raven alone with the escape pod for about five hours. When she comes back to check on her, Raven is on her knees with a wrench in her hand and her head inside an open hatchway. Loud clanging noises are coming from inside the body of the pod._

_“You’re supposed to be fixing it,” Abby observes dryly, “not smashing it into kindling.”_

_“This thing is amazing,” Raven exclaims from halfway inside the hatch, her voice muffled by metal and wiring, and Abby feels it again, this surge of life inside her._

No, Abby, _she tells herself firmly._ She’s with someone else. She told you. She has someone on the ground. You can’t do anything.

_And then Raven emerges from the hatch, sweaty and grimy and aglow with happiness, and Abby feels her heart turn over in her chest._

_“It’s gonna be a big job,” says Raven. “But I can do it.”_

_“You’re sure?” Abby presses her. “It’s a centuries-old dented tin can, Raven, I need to be sure you’re not gonna fry me.”_

_Raven shakes her head. “The bones are strong,” she says, running a hand over the dented metal exterior. “And that’s what matters. All the internal systems, they’re old but they’re stable. They’ll hold. Get a few new parts in them and you’d never know you were riding in a pod older than the Ark. They built these guys to last, see. They didn’t have the resources we had. These escape pods had to survive a lot rougher conditions than we do now. Less atmospheric buffering on reentry. Less sensitive altitude controls. The ship just dropped them and hoped to God they caught the right orbital trajectory. These babies had to be tough,” she says, and her hand on the flat panel is almost affectionate, like a caress. “The fact that she’s made it this far means she’s a lot tougher than she looks,” she says. “She was built to survive.”_

_“It’s a she?” asks Abby, amused in spite of herself. “Does she have a name?”_

_“I’ll think of one,” Raven promises her._

_“Think of a good one,” says Abby. “A strong name. A name you can believe in. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”_

_# # #_

_For the next five days, they work together side-by-side. Jackson is covering for Abby in Medical – Kane has come by a few times, asking questions, forcing Abby to deflect him – so she can be Raven’s extra pair of hands in their new makeshift workshop._

_Abby likes watching Raven work. She’s bright and quick and sometimes hums to herself and her confidence is catching. She continues to hope against hope that eventually the little flutter in the pit of her stomach that Raven’s presence elicits will finally fade – she continues to remind herself that Raven is doing this for Finn Collins (she has gotten a little bit more of the story by now) and that she can’t throw the girl up against the side of the escape pod to kiss her just because she likes the way the thin sheen of sweat on Raven’s caramel skin makes her glow like she’s lit from within._ Raven feels nothing for you, Abby, _she tells herself firmly._ She never did. It was one night. It was almost a year ago. Let it go.

_And she almost maybe does, until the sixth day._

_“I finally thought of a name,” says Raven without preamble, the moment Abby walks into the room._

_“You did?”_

_“I did.” Abby steps past her into the room, where she can see that Raven has taped a torn piece of cloth over part of the pilot’s side door._

_“We should have a bottle of champagne or something,” Abby observes dryly, “isn’t that what they used to do? With ships and things?”_

_“If you could find a bottle of champagne aboard the Ark,” retorts Raven, “I’d never let you waste it by smashing it on the side of the escape pod. Besides, the paint’s not dry on the lettering yet. You’d ruin two hours of hard work.”_

_Abby laughs. “All right,” she says. “Let’s have it. Proceed with the great unveiling.”_

_Raven skips over to the escape pod and begins carefully peeling away the tape holding the cloth. “I was thinking about what you said that first day,” she explains, over her shoulder, “about whether the pod was too dented and banged up to survive. And I told you – do you remember what I told you?”_

_“You told me she only looked beat-up,” Abby says back, smiling a little. “That underneath the chips and dents and cracked glass, her bones were as strong as ever. That she was built to survive.”_

_“Built to survive,” Raven agrees. “That’s right.” She peels away the last piece of tape and removes the cloth, revealing the escape pod’s new name in gleaming, freshly-painted black letters:_

**_A B I G A I L._ **

_Abby cannot speak._

_“She had it in her all along,” Raven says softly, turning to Abby a little hesitantly and watching her face to see whether this is all right, whether Abby understands, or whether she has perhaps made a mistake. “She just didn’t know it. She needed a little tending, is all.”_

_“She needed_ you _,” says Abby, her voice rough with emotion. “She needed your hands. She needed someone who wouldn’t give up on her.”_

_“And maybe I . . . I might have maybe needed her too,” says Raven, suddenly shy, staring down at the ground, scuffing her boot against a loose floor panel. “Maybe I needed to feel like – I don’t know – like I had a purpose again.”_

_Abby reaches out her hand and traces a delicate fingertip along the crisp black letters of her own name on the side of the escape pod._

_“You said I should give it a name that was strong,” says Raven, almost apologetically, as though suddenly embarrassed. “You said it should be a name I had faith in.” Abby turns and looks at her then, drawn towards her by some magnetic force. Their faces are so close together. They can taste each other’s breath. “She made it this far,” says Raven. “That’s what I told you. She made it this far, that’s how I knew she was built to survive. Sure, she’s got scars. She’s a little banged up. Picked up some bumps and bruises along the way. That just means she’s endured. She’s been through some shit and come out the other side of it. The scars on the outside aren’t what matters, Abby. I’ve seen what’s on the inside, and trust me. She’s invincible.”_

_“Raven,” Abby begins, but doesn’t quite know what to say after that. Raven is so close to her. Raven is right there. Her eyes are wide and dark and earnest, and Abby knows they aren’t really talking about the escape pod anymore._

_“I’ve seen what’s on the inside,” Raven says again, softly, her voice almost a murmur. “That’s how I know she’s strong. She can survive anything. Just have a little faith.”_

_“I do,” says Abby. “I have faith in_ you _.”_

_And the effort that it’s taken her so far to keep herself from kissing Raven finally overcomes her, and she just gives up. She can’t help it. It’s like trying to hold back a tidal wave with one hand. She seizes Raven’s mouth in her own, one hand dropping to the girl’s waist while the other entangles her hair, and Raven’s arms immediately tighten around Abby’s back, her mouth open and inviting, pulling Abby in._

_She tried so hard to fight it, that thing that happens inside her heart when Raven is near her. She really did try. But there’s something about the mechanic that dismantles Abby completely, pulling her apart piece by piece. She thought it was just desire – and it is, my God, she does desire her, she wants to take Raven right here, she’s thinking that looks more and more like a real possibility – but it’s not just that._

_It’s something else._

_It’s something she’s not ready to say out loud just yet._

_It’s something that would sound insane if she said it out loud. She cannot possibly say it._

_Not after one night together over a year ago that ended in disaster, and five days of tinkering with machinery on Sub-Level 3._

_It would be insanity._

_She can’t possibly say it. Not here. Not now._

But someday, _Abby thinks to herself, as Raven’s mouth moves beneath hers and she feels hope begin to rise up again inside her heart._

Someday I will tell her.

Someday I will tell her the story of how she saved me.

Abby watched Raven’s chest rise and fall in the peaceful rhythm of sleep. No nightmares tonight – her breathing was even and calm – and Abby felt the tension inside her own chest relax. She curled her body up against Raven’s, savoring the warmth of her skin, slipping one arm across Raven’s hips and pulling herself close against her. She hadn’t meant to wake her, but she felt Raven suddenly start, just a little, in her arms, and then she turned to face Abby.

“Sorry,” Abby said quietly. “I was trying to let you sleep.”

“It’s okay,” Raven smiled sleepily back at her. “Come here.” She holds out her hand and Abby moves closer, draping one leg over Raven’s and sliding an arm across her back so their bodies are entangled, facing each other.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” Abby said again. Raven kissed her mouth, lightly and affectionately.

“I’m not,” she said. “I was dreaming about the Mount Weather power grid schematics. It was pretty boring.” She runs a gentle fingertip up the soft white skin of Abby’s arm. “This is much nicer.”

“I worry when you don’t get enough sleep.”

“I know you do,” Raven laughed a little. “That’s why I love you.” She closed her eyes and burrowed deeply down into the pillow before the full force of what she had said finally hit her, and she sat up bolt upright to see Abby staring at her, eyes wide.

There it was.

It was out now, and there was no un-saying it.

“I didn’t mean to – “ Raven began, but came to an abrupt halt when she realized there was no possible end to that sentence. _I didn’t mean to toss that out there so casually while I was making fun of how much you nag me? I didn’t mean to spring that on you before I had any idea how you felt? I didn’t mean to make you deal with this after we’ve only been together – whatever the hell “together” means – for a few weeks?_

_I didn’t mean to say it, because I’m afraid you don’t feel the same way and I was terrified of the way you would look at me if you couldn’t say it back?_

But she was silent.

They were all useless, all those answers. They meant nothing. They were just a way to cover for the fact that Raven was afraid.

“It’s okay, Abby,” she finally said. Abby was still looking at her, an entirely unreadable expression on her face. “It’s okay,” she said again. “You don’t have to say it back. I get it, Abby. It’s okay. I know that –“

But she never got to finish that sentence because suddenly Abby’s mouth was on hers, warm and passionate, pulling Raven in, and when they finally broke apart so a startled Raven could catch her breath, she saw that Abby was crying and laughing at the same time.

“You idiot,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against Raven’s. “I wanted to say it a thousand times.”

Raven felt her own eyes begin to sting with tears. “Say it,” she whispered. “Please, Abby, say it.”

“You rescued me, Raven,” whispered Abby, her voice choked with emotion. “Over and over. You were the only one who could. Every time I was lost, you were the light in the window that led me home. You were my salvation, Raven.” She kissed the girl’s mouth, over and over. “I love you,” she said. “I love you. I love you.”

And there it was again.

_Hope._

From the dark nightmare of Mount Weather, from the pain and suffering they had all endured, something true and good had come. Inside their cracked and weather-beaten hearts, as dented and tarnished as the hull of that old Russian spacecraft, tiny green shoots were beginning to wind their way up through the soil.

“The sun’s coming up,” said Raven suddenly, her eye caught by the lightening of the night sky outside Abby’s window. Abby kissed her again.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, it is.”


End file.
